AT HEART

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

waging peace
restores harmony
uncovers common values where only conflicts
and differences in appearance surface
steps outside dominant viewpoints
teaches children alternatives to consumerism
which is self-centered at its core
engenders instead the practice of doing good work
reveals to us the unfavorable implications “God bless America”
extends to the rest of the world

O Holy One, waging peace reaches
to alienated people
envisions a holistic economy
embraces scholarship and meaningful labor
recasts globalization
to profit people in general rather multinational corporations
and powerful elites
fosters democracy and equality
rather poverty and powerlessness

*   *   *

Christ’s profound message of peace and justice
is seldom presented fully, much less heard or understood

each person needs to be respected and loved first
as a child of God, at heart

Poem copyright 2016 by Jnana Hodson
To see the full set, click here.

EMPHASIZING THE LIVING WORD

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

One point Quakers have emphasized is that the Word of God is Christ rather than the Bible. It’s a point made clear in the first chapter of the gospel of John, where what is often translated as the Word – or the Greek philosophical concept of Logos – was made flesh and dwelled among us.

Fundamentalists, in contrast, insist the Word is the book, usually in a King James translation, or so it seems.

Some Christians, aware of the difference, will speak of the Living Word, meaning Christ, on one hand, and the Written Word or some variation, on the other.

The consequences of these differing understandings can be drastic.

In his book Seekers Found: Atonement in Early Quaker Experience, Douglas Gwyn cites another criticism of those who claim their religious authority springs from Scripture. Summarizing John 5:45-47, he says: “Moses, the legendary author of the Torah, will be the witness against those who have staked their salvation and spiritual authority upon Scripture.” It’s a remarkable turn in the argument. Moses, after all, had met the Holy One in the Burning Bush. There was something much more compelling than the written words to draw upon.

It was a first-hand experience rather than a retelling. For Friends, of course, the Holy One was (and is) present in Meeting for Worship and in faithful daily life.

Quakers advanced another concept they called gospel order, which was living in that faithful daily awareness. Again, citing Gwyn, the pivotal early Quaker George Fox “wrote of gospel order as the restoration of the relations between man and woman in Eden before the Fall.” For Friends, this became the basis for allowing women to establish and manage their own Meetings for Business at a time when the very idea was scandalous.

It all points to another central point of dialogue: the source of authority in our various identities and practices. These understandings are important, I sense, because they can profoundly affect our outlook on life itself and the ways we live within it.

And yes, no matter how much we might “question authority,” at some point we still need meaningful structure in direction – individually and collectively. Just where do you find it, in your own experience?

~*~

More of my own reflections on alternative Christianity are found at Religion Turned Upside Down.

WE AGE ALONG THE WAY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Being mindful of what’s right in front of us can always be a challenge. Here are 10 new items from my end.

~*~

  1. One definition of high summer for me: going to the beach for a swim at low tide and then stopping at the commercial fish distributor on the way home to pick out three lobsters followed by a stop at a farm a bit down the road for a dozen ears of corn picked just that morning. We’re soon feasting in the Smoking Garden, no problem making a mess. You know, the one-pot cooking thing for starters.
  2. Someone’s cell phone goes off during worship, insisting “Please say a command.” On the page of the open Bible next to me is an answer, “That your joy be complete” (Jesus, in the gospel of John). Who’s to argue? Not a bad command, is it?
  3. Falling walnuts hit the roof of our kitchen and sound like falling limbs or falling wooden boxes. Just where are our squirrels?
  4. The joys of a sharp black fountain pen, excising a draft to lace.
  5. There’s a restless in the core of our Seed. Usually, we try running from it. In silent worship, we stop to face it.
  6. As a writer, I’m an orphan. And yes, so is the Lone Ranger, once unmasked at the mirror.
  7. How deeply productivity is built into my psyche!
  8. Inspired by Richard Brown Lethem’s painting “Wink/Blue Table,” I like the idea of a poem or story being its own table rather than representing something else. Even as its own Table of Contents. (Where he’s a monkey, I’m a squirrel – rather than the hawk I’d envisioned.)
  9. “Closure victimizes thought” – Donald Revell on John Ashbery.
  10. Step on a nail in the garden. What a sore sole the next day! In contrast to sore soul.

~*~

They're everywhere.
They’re everywhere.

 

 

WHILE COOL, RAINY WEATHER DELAYS THE TOMATOES RIPENING

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

slugs thrive, and I’m back in Seattle, except
that here, broccoli, cucumbers, zucchini, and peppers
arrive in waves

and our woodworker-electrician and I tackle the barn renovation
in earnest

still, in a few breaks, I cross the line into Maine
sometimes with my Lady of Children’s Television
leaping rapturously in big surf
and sometimes with the afternoon all to myself
and once with the whole family
only to discover I’ve packed No 4 sunscreen
rather than No 15
(as a serious burns will demonstrate)

in all of this matter of burrows and burrowing
in the earth, in the foliage, at the beach

while fully resolving to keep the wedding simple
my Lady of Parsley and Sage delves deep into planning
what has already become too complicated for my taste
(“what do you mean, you don’t want a potluck?”)
and we meet with an Oversight Committee

in Portsmouth Harbor the family tours a Viking ship
on its way from Iceland to Manhattan
and the following week, a full-size Theodore Tugboat
with rolling eyes and all, as any kid watching PBS could explain

all the while, life itself feels submerged in Limbo
as absconded as our plumbers

Poem copyright 2016 by Jnana Hodson
For more, click here.

 

A MAIN STREET IN MAINE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment
Those trying to make the place trendy like to call it SoBe.
Those trying to make the place trendy like to call it SoBe.

South Berwick, just across the Salmon River from us, has a downtown block that retains an iconic appearance. The town is also home to Berwick Academy, a private prep school.

 

The writing on the wall touts Dover, in New Hampshire just to the west.
The writing on the wall touts Dover, in New Hampshire just to the west.

REGARDING THE GATE HOUSE AT BLODGETT’S CANAL AND LOCKS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Thoreau turned upstream on the Merrimack
rather than to the ocean

before heading back

~*~

needles and rotting leaves
the floor of the stream steep
water the color of tea

it’s a dangerous
river that was home

shores denuded
when tall pines older than the railroad
were felled to make way
for fiber optic cable

they say you log on
in its branching current

owls and herons take him away
above the hydroelectric turbines

~*~

landing adventurously
perhaps to shout

I remember where you are

the cuisine isn’t that much different
than our second city together

To continue, click here.
Copyright 2015

ALONG WITH THE REZ

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When you drive, details pile up.

Where mat-house villages once stood, Highway 21 now runs along a large irrigation canal. Because the roadway goes nearly straight, a few subtle curves become especially treacherous.

Illegal aliens buy cars but have no driver’s license or training. No insurance, either. There’s a headlamp out, few repairs, or brakes gone bad. Talk about trouble.

In the dark, a big white furry wing sweeps in front of my windshield. An owl. An omen, nearly colliding. It’s hard to say who’s more startled.

It might have told me the Pom Pom or feather religion, Washat, remains the most practiced old religion on the reservation.

Kokopelli was a member.

Twenty cars park in a hollow point toward what appears to be a white frame meetinghouse. Inside is a congregation of dove hunters.

There isn’t a cloud in the sky, only one jet contrail as crows circle some relentless screeching. As they flap up, slaughter moves out of the shadows and coyote pursue the only antelope in these parts, the ones on the Army reservation.

On the bright side, the State Fair is a three-hundred-pound pumpkin multiplied. Its doe-goats are judged by measuring and weighing their teats in a beauty pageant stripped to essentials.

Back home, her moodiness could be impossible.

Downtown, about nine at night, a wino-cowboy walks into the office. “Where’s the city desk?” He has no place to stay. “It’s a long story.” A quarter in his pocket, stub of a cigarette, and scabies — mites that are highly contagious. “I don’t want to spread them the way some bastard did to me.” So he went to the hospital from the Gospel Mission, received medicine (how’d he know to do all this?). Didn’t get back in. (“He refused to stay for the service,” they explained.) Angry, turns to ask: “Where does a stranger go for help in this town?”

How should I know? I’m just filling in for somebody else.

“Well, if anybody whizzes you,” the stranger says, “it was a matter of amphetamines. Maybe you heard about ‘The Duke’ in Traders? The trial dismissed on procedural grounds?”

He buried $67,000, but when he returned, the money was gone. So he says, far too articulate for the typical migrant.

Later, Kokopelli tells me that guy’s trouble.

Details pile up as I stay downtown at night and taste the psychic toll of economic theories in wasted, untapped talents. The stench stirs tears. Lonely men at counters stretch cups. Icy evenings of waitresses, cowboys, GIs, prostitutes drive from many towns, a migrant worker family whose car broke down, out-of-work loggers, midnight mechanics and nurses. Add to them an assortment of skinny wannabe rich bitches or real estate and insurance brokers. Clerks trying to live on earnings from clothing stores. A few lumpy bag ladies. Walk in, and all look up from their coffee with vacant eyes. It could be Dickens.

I see another hunger, but my own faith isn’t strong enough — I’d yield to despair.

Later, I sing to Kokopelli, “All of man’s good resolutions turn sang froid in the seasons of samsara.” Noticing his quizzed expression, I translate: “Our good intentions turn cold-blooded in the web of life’s illusions.”

It’s the spider again. Coyote’s cousin. Their damned net.

“Sometimes, Bozo, I wonder about you,” Kokopelli says, exhaling blue curlicues.

“There’s no Dedicated Laborious Quest, no magic without the strength of sitting or dancing.”

I dare not be entrapped in any desire to move freely through the vertical and horizontal dimensions of wherever I simply am. So far I’ve surveyed past and present. The future must wait. First, I need to map the emotional and sensual planes of this realm. Every dance has distinctive rhythms and expressions, as Kokopelli reminds me.

For more insights from the American Far West and Kokopelli, click here.

FADEOUT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

a woman in an improbable hoop skirt
and headscarf
lights a wall of candles

salmon-colored bands on a wall, plus a solar diagram
and an Elizabethan woman

black chair, as two birds flying in opposite directions
as she reads her book

in a balloon, the fog

handbag and coffee New York

Poem copyright 2016 by Jnana Hodson
To see the full set of Partitas, click here.

NIGHT WATCH

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

1

between sunset and sunrise
the ocean returns to desolate obsidian

of her dark depths
in the character

at best, stars above
strand of shoreline, depending

maybe the moon
with her sea-legs

or repeated slapping

2

breakers arrive as a single point of reflected white
opening out evenly in a line on either side

a lip, sometimes to one side only
rarely claiming, “I love you”

sheets of gleaming water shift on the sand
or everything way out, obscured
in fog

scolding
pipers scurry about
on their stilt-legs

at highest tide, pebbles sound of boiling

with all the sunburned drunks long asleep
or the party, behind glass or on the deck
a cigarette meanders somewhere to my left
though I catch no shards of conversation

3

if only the beach were not broken
by rocky fingers and cliffs

unseen ledges and outcroppings

or overwhelmed in abrupt tempests

the night voyageur might sail dependably
by the compass

but vessels and their crews
mostly go down along coastline
blindly

mistranslating, the whole sense stymied
by a single word, a puzzle, upturned wind

4

count the seconds, then, in the flashing
points
matched to the chart

one red-lighted buoy
white caps below

Whaleback just clearing the hilltop

a large, well-lighted ship near the Shoals
waiting for high tide to enter Portsmouth

or on a very clear night, way off
Thacher Island, Cape Ann, Gloucester

how is it the Boon flare jumps about
three spots, playing the length of shrouded rock island?

of the available beacons
the closest, curiously, appears only a muffle

in the call of the underside
“come to me”

mournful bell or horn
and strobe light

restless, relentless
rhythm, however unpredictable
retreats, advances
restores, destroys
cleanses

5

I cannot imagine rowing ten miles to an island
at midnight

after an evening in town

but they did
for a drink or conversation
so they said

Poem copyright 2016 by Jnana Hodson
To see the full set of seacoast poems, click here.

TWO MISFITS IN THE FORM OF FREE SPIRITS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

So we can’t really stay in that circle, secure as it might be. Honestly, your Zorba and my Elektrik Bleu would chafe too much under an imposed discipline. As it is, there’s just not enough time or freedom to satisfy our creative endeavors or passions. Much less all the community service we require of ourselves.

Our dilemma is in wanting all the benefits of Old Order or monastic communion, with few of its restrictions.  (Never mind our own relentless self-discipline.)

Now, in our own households, with our gardens and mates and children, we live decades later.

The landscape really is a maze, after all.

Oh, vicar! Said the clerk, kayaking with the physician, too.

Actually, I wonder.

When I lived in the ashram, we heard stories of Americans who’d gone to India and found it impossible to return to the U.S.A., in large part because of the secular emphasis here, rather than the God-intoxication there.

It’s equally difficult to be left hanging in transition, as I feel I am these days.

But we need to be faithful in resting in the Lord “centering” in the Lord, as we might translate much of Hebrews rather than leaning on others to do the spiritual warfare for us.

My Bible opened on 1 Corinthians 3 and 4 in Meeting First-day last, and I was struck by the way Paul emphasizes our role in being co-laborers with God, rather than trying to do it all ourselves or expecting Him to do it all for us.

(It was not the passage I was trying to locate!) When I came to the passage, “Already you have all you want!” my mind instantly began its litany of desires: book publication, family, home, recognition, close circle of friends, and so on.

Then, when I had centered again, the passage re-translated itself as “you already have everything you need,” which is all the more intriguing now that I’ve looked up other translations of the same passage (1 Corinthians 4:8) – there’s a big difference between desires and needs, and between being filled with food or enriched and being hungry or impoverished. We can do much more when we’re fed or have the riches to invest than when we’re starving and beggarly.

The hidden, spiritual turns that happen in the life of the faithful often amaze us, and yet they seem so natural.

Thee speaks of the ways the doors to Plainness have opened to thee, even when thee thought them closed, and I could speak of the ways I was drawn back to family roots I had been totally ignorant existed in the Quaker, Brethren, and Mennonite origins of the Hodgsons and Ehrstines, all the way back.

It’s no accident.

~*~

For more Seasons of the Spirit, click here.